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Canada’s eternally recurring Quebec crisis: Walkom

Will Quebec’s April 7 election result in yet another sovereignty referendum?

in 1995 Canada almost fractured after a referendum that Jacques Parizeau’s fossilized sovereigntists came within a heartbeat of winning, writes Thomas Walkom. (RYAN REMIORZ / The Canadian Press file photo)

Can it be? Is Canada headed for another majority sovereigntist government in Quebec?

Will the country once again be embroiled in the perennial debate over whether Canada and Quebec should divorce?

Some in the smart money set say no. They point out that support inside Quebec for sovereignty hovers not too far above the low-water mark of 40 per cent.

People far more knowledgeable than I say that even if Premier Pauline Marois’ sovereigntist Parti Québécois wins a legislative majority on April 7 (and the polls suggest it will) another gut-wrenching referendum on separation is not in the works.

Sovereignty is said to be passé among younger Quebecers. Marois is dismissed as a fossil from another time.

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And perhaps she is.

But history has a horrifying tendency to repeat itself. Nietzsche called it eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things.”

For ancient Greece, the reference point was Sisyphus, a mythical ruler doomed each and every day to push a giant boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down again.

Hollywood’s version was Groundhog Day, a movie in which a television weatherman finds himself fated to relive Feb.2 over and over and over again.

A pessimist might see parallels to Canada here.

Certainly, separatism has been dismissed before. The PQ’s failure to win a referendum on sovereignty in 1980 was thought then to have put paid to the issue.

In 1989, with support for separatism hovering near 40 per cent, sovereignty was said to be dead and buried, The PQ’s then leader, Jacques Parizeau, was routinely dismissed as a fossil from another time.

Young people, we were told then, had abandoned sovereignty and become internationally minded.

“What we are living in now is the anti-climax of the separatism issue,” the then editor of La Presse told a Chicago Tribune reporter.

Sovereigntists, he went on, “are trying to keep alive a flame that does not burn any longer in the hearts of the people.”

That was 1989. Six years later, Canada almost fractured after a referendum that Parizeau’s fossilized sovereigntists came within a heartbeat of winning.

The point is that nationalism is a profoundly powerful force. In Quebec, a rock-hard minority see sovereignty as the logical aim of their nationalism. Others are, from time to time, willing to be convinced. That dynamic is unlikely to disappear.

None of this means that events are fixed in stone. Election campaigns are notoriously volatile. Polls have Marois’ PQ in the lead now. But that could change.

Even if the PQ does form a majority government, it could decide a third sovereignty referendum too risky to try.

Theoretically, anything is possible.

But I confess I have a sinking feeling that Nietzsche was right. Already, we are seeing federal political parties manouevring over who could best further the interests of a united Canada.

Justin Trudeau is attempting to don his father’s mantle as the enemy of separatism. New Democratic Party Leader Tom Mulcair (who predicts another sovereignty referendum in the event of a Marois victory) boasts that most of his new MPs won their seats at the expense of the Bloc Québécois.

“The NDP was the first party to get rid of the separatists,” he told CBC Radio last week.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who inked a controversial job-training deal with Marois Wednesday will portray themselves the party that can make what they call “open federalism” work.

Already, too, comments are beginning to appear suggesting that the rest of Canada no longer cares, that in the event of another referendum the country is prepared to hand Quebec its walking papers.

That, too, harkens back to another time, when disgruntled Canadians told anyone who would listen that they were tired of coddling Quebec and didn’t care if the province went its own way.

But in the end, the rest of Canada did care. It always does.

No matter how many times that bloody rock rolls down the hill, we keep on trying to push it back up.

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